Aging Gracefully, China’s Internet Heads to Launch Insurance Venture

When the two biggest names in the Chinese Internet sector get together to start an online insurance business, it can mean only one thing: China’s heroes of online innovation are getting old.

Tencent Chairman and CEO Pony Ma

Reuters

Speaking together at an event in Shanghai on Wednesday, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Chairman Jack Ma, 49, and Tencent Holdings Ltd. Chief Executive Pony Ma, 42, both agreed that growing older in the fast-changing tech sector is a challenge.

“My biggest crisis is that I don’t understand what young people like,” Pony Ma said, speaking to an auditorium of students from Shanghai’s Fudan University, where the two announced the new venture—called Zhong An Online Property Insurance and jointly invested in by Tencent, Alibaba, and Ping An Insurance (Group) Co.—which will sell insurance products online.

Pony Ma then admitted that he couldn’t understand “the fun” of the popular American mobile photo-messaging app Snapchat despite its popularity in the U.S. among teenage girls. Earlier this week The Wall Street Journal reported that Tencent is vying to lead a fundraising round of $200 million for the app.

“If you ask me what I worry about every morning when I wake up, it’s that I don’t understand future mainstream Internet users’ habits,” Pony Ma said, adding that growing old can be the biggest problem for the leader of a large Internet company like Tencent. “Even if you don’t make any mistakes, the mistake is that you are too old and need to be replaced.”

Pony Ma’s comments were redolent of those made by Jack Ma earlier this year in a letter announcing his resignation as chief executive of Alibaba. At that time, Jack Ma wrote that at 48 years of age he was “no longer ‘young’ for the Internet business,” adding that it was time for him to step aside so younger leaders could rise. Echoing that sentiment Wednesday, Jack Ma said the delight he gets now is not in the new products he can create, but instead in supporting the younger generation in their endeavors to do something new.

Despite their lamentations, neither Jack Ma nor Pony Ma are really rusting unburnished. Though Jack Ma has stepped back from the day-to-day operations of Alibaba, he has been busy meeting with Chinese officials. Meanwhile, Pony Ma’s Tencent is responsible for the most popular mobile application in China, WeChat, and the company has more recently been making waves in Silicon Valley with a series of investments in startups there.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Nonetheless, the direction both Alibaba and Tencent are taking shows a new level of maturity. While Alibaba first helped anyone with an idea open an online store, it is now pushing out products to help young people save and invest their money, or take out loans to expand a business. Meanwhile, Tencent is hoping to complement its online gaming business with a new endeavor for which it has applied for a banking license.

And the new insurance company itself shows that old age has yet its honor for the two Mas, who are not related. Both were quite excited at the fact that the normally hidebound Chinese regulators allowed them to start the nation’s first Internet insurance company, which is geared in particular to helping get young people insured.

Though he may feel old, Jack Ma certainly didn’t sound it when he discussed the curiosity that has fueled his career in the Internet and his desire to grow Alibaba’s e-commerce business into a financial-services operation.

“A lot of people say you can’t do this, that’s not OK. We are curious, why isn’t it OK? Why can’t we do it? There are people who say that the financial industry is too risky, Internet companies shouldn’t touch it. Well, I’m curious.”

The peroration gives hope there may yet be some work of noble note for him before he fades out.